Mystery visitor to Poe’s grave a no-show this year

Published 6:00 pm, Monday, January 18, 2010

Photo: AP2010

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Cynthia Pelayo, of Chicago, leaves roses and cognac at the burial site of Edgar Allen Poe Tuesday in Baltimore. She left the roses and cognac after a mysterious visitor who has left roses and cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on the writer's birthday failed to show early Tuesday, breaking with a ritual that began more than 60 years ago. less

Cynthia Pelayo, of Chicago, leaves roses and cognac at the burial site of Edgar Allen Poe Tuesday in Baltimore. She left the roses and cognac after a mysterious visitor who has left roses and cognac at the ... more

Photo: AP2010

Mystery visitor to Poe’s grave a no-show this year

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BALTIMORE — It is what Edgar Allan Poe might have called “a mystery all insoluble“: Every year for the past six decades, a shadowy visitor would leave roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac on Poe’s grave on the anniversary of the writer’s birth. This year, no one showed.

Briefs

Did the mysterious “Poe toaster” meet his own mortal end? Did some kind of ghastly misfortune befall him? Will he be heard from nevermore?

The visitor’s absence this year only deepened the mystery over his identity. One name mentioned as a possibility was that of a Baltimore poet and known prankster who died in his 60s last week. But there is little or no evidence to suggest he was the man.

Poe was the American literary master of the macabre, known for poems such as “The Raven” and grisly short stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” ’’The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” He is also credited with writing the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He died in 1849 in Baltimore at age 40 after collapsing in a tavern.

The annual tribute began in 1949 — unless it started earlier, or later. The first printed reference to the tribute can be found that year in The Evening Sun of Baltimore. The newspaper mentioned “an anonymous citizen who creeps in annually to place an empty bottle (of excellent label)” against the gravestone.

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